The first beta of Kodi 15 (what was known as XBMC) has been released. Kodi 15 Isengard don’t have a lot of new features but there are a lot of small changes, the development team saying it is a “clean up” edition with a few tweaks. Here is the rather large list of changes in the new beta, which you can find on Kodi.tv.

  • Reworked add-on manger that should give a better overview
  • * Chapter selection window that shows thumbs on where to skip to in the video
  • * Easier to navigate audio and subtitle selection list
  • * Addition of language add-ons which allow us to update the User-Interface text outside of regular releases
  • * Expansion of international options like time and date format, temperature and speed units.
  • * Skip steps (step forward & backwards) improvements.
  • * Tuxbox removal. Users of Enigma2 boxes can use the VUPlus PVR add-on
  • * Split PVR add-ons into separate projects which should allow updates through repo in the future
  • * Fix season art scraping on newly added seasons
  • * Immediately fetch updates from repository after Kodi version upgrade
  • * Improvement of installing new skins selection
  • * Remove legacy code pre-Frodo 11.0
  • * Add jump to first unwatched in TV section
  • * Remove certain codecs from our core code and made add-ons out of them. Audio encoders/decoders
  • * Removal of AFP filesystem support
  • * Windows DXVA HEVC hardware decoding support if driver and hardware support exist
  • * Added adaptive seeking through audio and video playback, also know as “skip steps”
  • * Android HEVC H.265 support for some chipsets
  • * Improve webserver caching control
  • * External subtitles over UPnP can be enabled through the settings section
  • * Allow scanning of new sources and marking as watched during other library operations such as “update library”
  • * Allow different sort orders for different sort methods
  • * Start of integration binary add-ons and changing the build system around it
  • * Improved CC (Closed Captions) support for Live TV
  • * ffmpeg 2.6.2 update
  • * Removal remaining SDL code which was used in some areas.
  • * Changed code to  C++11
  • * Variety of memleaks, segfaults, crashes and minor issues fixed
  • * Rescrape season art for newly added seasons
  • * Upgrade included webserver which should fix issues with remotes loosing connections
  • * On Android the system now handles the volume
  • * General improvements regarding code stability and performance in all areas
  • * General code clean-up in all areas to simplify adding future features
  • * Mac OSX
    • – Minimal 10.7 Lion required
    • – Only OSX 64-bit builds provided by us, so no more 32bit builds
    • – Minimal MacOSX 10.10 SDK
  • * iOS
    • – Minimal iOS 5.1 required
    • – Minimal iOS 8.1 SDK
    • – No more ATV2 builds
  • * Android
    • – Minimum Android 4.2 Jelly Bean MR1 required
    • – Android API 17 as minimum with SDK 14 and NDK 10e
    • – Removed the need for root/SU on Android. Some hardware/firmware might not like that. Please contact your hardware supplier
    • – Android PIL packaging fixed

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